The struggles of senior video production

The myth is that your life flashes before your eyes right before you die. This myth may or may not hold true, but it leaves many to wonder what that experience may be like. Will being reminded of the good old days of playing on the elementary school playground spark happiness, or will it leave one yearning to experience childhood once again? What would the entire senior class see if they all had the same experience collectively?

The senior video is a project where students of the graduating senior class create a recap of their memories, dating all the way back to the very first moments of their lives in the most creative and entertaining way possible. This video is very important to many people because it is a collection of nostalgia. It recaps the long journey that all of us have taken to be able to graduate. The video is expected to invoke happiness, excitement, and sad reflection all at once. Senior videos require a very long process and a lot of hard work to be executed properly.

I am one of the four people in charge of creating the 2018 senior video, along with fellow seniors Sophie Yergin, Janie Mitchell, and Sydney Aramian. Let me take you behind the curtain and let you in on the biggest challenges we have been faced with throughout the year.

First of all, our stress was a function of our own high expectations. We expect this video to the best one yet, and in order to do that, each second of the video must be meticulously planned and executed to perfection. However, just as most things go, perfection may not be a feasible goal. At young stages of the process, I began to resent everything short of perfection, I came to the realization that I will never be satisfied with my creations because perfection is subjective. What seems perfect to me could seem lousy to someone else.

The subjectiveness involved with creative projects is ten fold when working on a project of such magnitude. There are going to be at least 1,250 pairs of eyes who will be intently watching. This video is made for the seniors here at South Lyon High School, so naturally, we want everybody to be happy with the final product. However, I was reminded time and time again, by senior Sophie Yergin that, “It is impossible to please everybody, and that’s a hard thing to accept.” The goal is to have every senior appear in the video several times without having the same people appear in it too frequently. Though we do have mostly everything sorted out, this was a big struggle because there were many students who were very reluctant to send in footage and some who definitely resented our incessant emails and TV2 announcements and signs and personal confrontations. “It is very difficult to include everyone in the video when there are only a few people who want to send in pictures.” said senior Sydney Aramian.

Even though the video has been in production since September, time is the biggest issue that we face. “I wish that third hour was 18 hours long, so I had more time to work on the video,” senior Janie Mitchell said. The amount of footage we gathered is massive, we have over 50 GB and sorting through all of it is a grueling process. It takes time for each section to get submitted for approval, which can take weeks of anticipation just to hear a ‘no’ in response.

At the end of the day, I am very proud of what Janie, Sophie, Sydney and I have accomplished. Yes, it was difficult. Yes, we spent many hours in frustration at times. But this was not supposed to be easy, and we all knew what we were signing up for. We pushed through the struggles, and we hope you feel, too, that we ended up with an amazing body of work that did not disappoint.